We usually consider mea culpas as good things, honest actions, purges of guilt, wiping clean the chalk smudged slates (to start again.) We want to regain a certain state of innocence, of internal peace. A sincere confession seems more purposeful than an everyday apology, a “sorry” which has become almost a place word in auto-fill conversations.
So, what transgression(s) prompt me to spill my guts?
Throughout my writing years, I have made notes on how I think poetry works (or doesn’t) along the lines of academic poets who write how-to books on how-to write poetry. The catalog of such instruction manuals is long as many of the said poets feel obligated to impart their knowledge and wisdom (for self-promotion and thus academic survival) though their efficacy is debatable.
My intentions were/are not so grand, yet on review of my haphazard scribblings—justifications, pontifications (if only to myself), personal aphorisms of art—I see how my opinions about poetry have become solidified into a rather limited notion, a kind of snotty smugness. I even conjured a label for this calcified creed: bedrock poetry. I relied on the fundamental definitions of what poetry is, on the dictionary definition. I was only concerned about the usual particulars of the craft: rhythm, form, figures of speech, sound devices, and continuity of image. In short, the discipline of it. [I even wrote a blog for this magazine, Bedrock Poetry, posted August 8, 2022.]
I priggishly dismissed the “fad” of prose-poems: struggled to appreciate flash-fiction, not really knowing the difference between the two. I kept writing poems like a dog, doggedly of habit, of old tricks. As a poetry editor, I was dubious of poetry submissions that were mostly PROSE in both form and feel. I made black and white distinctions.
Recently, however, it dawned on me that several of my pieces were sufficiently reliant on imagery to be prosy poems and might be more effective in a hybrid genre. Or were narrative enough to be flashy fiction. Closely related, but as suggested, prose-poetry emphasizes imagery, language use and poetic devices, the moment, the mood much as regular poetry does. While flash-fiction emphasizes story or plot line and the character of participating actors.
Trouble is there are ‘traditional’ narrative poems and there are lyrical prose pieces that use poetic devises. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one among many examples of the former and arguments could support writers from Thomas Hardy to Tim O’Brien as the latter. I wonder, is the definitional difference determined purely by length or number of words in a piece of flash-fiction or prose poem, both being a brief expression?
Waving my magic pencil over several of my pieces, I thought they took on a new life akin to running into an old girlfriend at the grocery store or discovering a lost ancestor hiding in the family tree. They were the same, but somehow different, a kind of reinterpretation considering some new perspective, a change of form, perhaps or with a few more details, or a few five-star words. They were like a valuable revision.
My contrition, my epiphany if you will, has been confirmed by the acceptance of half a dozen prose-poems by a literary journal specializing in the genre. The fact of publication does not necessarily legitimize a literary form, but the lesson for me is simply that, despite my experience writing in various genres, I must be open to the evolving art of literature, to the squishy definitions commonly of our time, to be less dismissive, to judge more objectively. Would that I could be so open to AI generated efforts, to artificial art that is coming at us oh so quickly.
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